stories we don’t tell

“I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger–and that it belongs to him.”
— James Baldwin

I’ve been crawling through the septic quagmire of American history again. I think maybe I’m never not there, wallowing in the messy, uncomfortable stuff that gets shoved into footnotes or erased entirely.

To what end? On bad days, like today, maybe just to feed my fury.

On good days, I like to think I different ideas, better reasons, a desire to do something, anything that might change it.

But that shit ain’t today.

Because it’s always been pretty abysmal, right? There’s this thing that happens when you start digging into the stories of people who didn’t make it into the official narrative. You find Indigenous activists who understood environmental stewardship centuries before we branded it “going green.” Black women building mutual aid networks during Reconstruction that could teach today’s organizers a masterclass in community resilience.

Immigrant workers who figured out that collective action was the only way to survive an exploitative system. Not because they were heroes, but because they weren’t stupid.

These weren’t the presidents and generals we memorized in school. They were regular people who saw patterns, who recognized the same bullshit cycling through American politics over and over: wealth concentration, scapegoating vulnerable populations, the eternal tension between democratic ideals and authoritarian impulses.

They left us breadcrumbs, if we bothered to look for them.

But here’s what makes me want to scream into the void.

We keep acting like everything happening now is unprecedented. The manufactured strife and xenophobia, the willful ignorance, the same damn mistakes dressed up in new hashtags. Meanwhile, the people who might have taught us how to break these cycles? How to build something better? They’ve been carefully edited out of our collective memory.

You’d be fucking dumb to think that’s an accident.

The sanitized version of American history we’re fed serves a purpose. It keeps us from recognizing the patterns, from understanding that this political chaos isn’t some shocking deviation from our noble past. It’s cyclical. It’s predictable. And the ordinary Americans who navigated it before us already figured out some of the fucking answers.

But you can’t follow a roadmap you’ve never been shown exists.

So yeah, I’m pissed. Not just at the current state of things, but at the deliberate amnesia that got us here. Until we’re willing to excavate the full truth of where we’ve been. The uncomfortable parts, the inconvenient voices, the stories that don’t fit our national mythology.

We’ll keep stumbling blind into the same traps our predecessors already learned to avoid.

And that, dear reader, is some grade-A American bullshit poison that you can go stick in your ear.